Jim Stares At Water

Husband, Dog dad, prolific water starer, and general misanthrope. He/Him, 60's. The queue is the primary source of posting.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Came across this art installation, Liza Lou's Kitchen, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. It's a kitchen made of tiny glass beads, that artist Liza Lou did, taking 5 yrs. to complete, from 1991 - 1996.

My favorite part is the sink.

Details of a recipe book.

All the details in tiny glass beads.

Love the pie in the oven.

Love this so much.

No wonder it took 5 yrs.

https://whitney.org/collection/works/34855?

[jimstares]

Proof that not only are we alive, we also know how to get dressed for fine dining. With the Lovely and Talented @kjuw89

[jimstares]

A trans ban came to rugby. Baltimore’s Ferals played on.

In February, USA Rugby banned transgender women from competing with other women at all levels. Something interesting happened: Many teams re

[deadgenerations]

in more pleasant news: this year is seeing the biggest humpback migration in Australian history, bigger than it was PRE whaling. That's right, there are more humpbacks migrating off the coast of Australia than there were BEFORE industrial whaling started.

A huge, fat W for environmentalists and Greenies. what an achievement

[lumsel]

we did it! we saved the fucking whales!!!!

[the-tao-of-fandom]

These whales were hunted to 150 individuals. Now there are 50,000 of them

Once hunted almost to extinction, the population of humpback whales currently migrating down Australia's east coast has bounced back and is

Further info for those interested

[pnwnativeplants]

Environmental activism works!!! If they tell you its hopeless they're lying and/or selling some shit!!!

[traegorn]

[hollowpursuits]

alan cumming as boris grishenko in goldeneye (1995)

[what-even-is-thiss]

I still like the term parental unit that we used to use as a joke in middle school and high school. Did everyone else do that or was it just a my social circles thing?

Anyways telling the kids to go collect their parental units at the end of an event is a) funny b) gender neutral and c) just refers to the person currently doing your parenting

Also if you’re on joking terms with your parents “greetings, child” “greetings, parental unit” is a top tier greeting. Makes you sound like robot aliens.

[croaksac]

via Seattle Times:

Local Ballard raccoon has been spotted thriving in a remarkably unique and charming body

Yes he(?)'s actually factually real and has even been given an extremely millennial nickname: Jimothy. Wildlife experts advise everyone to just leave him alone and let him live his life

[crochethub]

Finished this gorgeous tapestry after months of working on it! by Emotional-Grape-3304

[sycophanticmind-deactivated2026]

nina simone and her daughter lisa

[kremlin]

uninstall adobe acrobat. it is malware. it has been malware. these aren't opinions: acrobat meets the definition of malware.

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

cheers

[andmaybegayer]

Firefox's built-in PDF.js viewer: does everything you could want from a basic viewer, fast enough search, and can now do annotations for filling in forms and such

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

LibreOffice Draw: I don't ever really like having to open this but if you have to edit a PDF in detail it does work, and doesn't just vomit up a bunch of polygons when you give it text to work with. Better as an authoring tool than an editor.

[ms-demeanor]

I've 100% replaced free acrobat with the firefox built-in and it works wonderfully for general office use and research/reading/viewing. It doesn't have robust redaction capabilities, but if you need to fill and sign and highlight a form it's actually much more intuitive than acrobat reader.

[cbssurfer]

Nose riding

[allhailthe70shousewife]

[overclassy]

[world-beauty]

A Furious Sky over Mount Shasta

Credits: Ralf Rohner

[tjeanal]

🤙🏻🌸🌸🌸

[depsidase]

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.

Split-joint seals (骑缝章qifengzhang)are still widely used on important paper documents in modern China, an anti-tampering technique passed down from ancient times. They are applied across the edge of multi-page contracts, bidding documents and official archives. If any page is removed or replaced, the broken seal pattern can prove the file has been altered.

[ariaste]

OMG I got so excited about this because they used a really similar (though far less refined) version of this for contracts in the European medieval period!

First they were called "chirographs", but later the word "indenture" (in its earliest meaning as just a legal document of any kind between two people) came to be used, originating from the practice of a contract being written twice on a single piece of parchment and then cut in half with serrated edges (as in dent, "teeth" -> indents -> indenture) in order for each party to take one half, so they could later piece them together and verify that there had been no forgery -- same as the Chinese silver drafts!

(Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, 1252, showing the serrated indents at the top -- presumably they are cutting rather than tearing because they're using parchment, which I expect is much harder to tear than wood-pulp paper like the Chinese were using)

Delights me when human beings find similar ways to solve the same problem at two different ends of the world. <3